The colonial era desire for local control, small government, and its costs to society vs benefits of consolidation

I am hoping there is an opportunity here to describe and pursue bipartisan agreement about what happened to America in the last third of the twentieth center that reversed the progress of the middle and lower classes and caused division and increasing racial and ethnic tension, how profit motive effects class and race, and how Yale University, one of the most prestigious in the U.S., 11,000 students, 4,000 are undergraduate, $31 billion endowment, located in the center of New Haven nearly 300 years, a former manufacturing city of 200,000 at its height, now a service and education economy of 130,000.... Yale can be part of the solution to New Haven's challenges of crime prevention and funding of city services, including public education.

I was sidetracked in a thread on Trump's ranking among all Presidents by some comments posted by TurtleDude. I live in a state, GA, formerly one of thirteen colonies, of more than 150 counties ranging in population of 3,000+ to over one million residents. I sent my younger adult years in another former original colony, CT, with just eight counties, where county governments, except for sheriffs and jails, were abolished a century ago. Unfortunately, this did not result in consolidation of local governments.
There are 169 city and town governments, a probate court in each, the only consolidation seeming to be a resident state trooper program that provides contracted police services to the least densely populated local governments by the CT State Police.

The exchanges with TurtleDude that prompted me to author this post . (He is a Yale alumni and I am a former New Haven resident familiar with Yale and some alumni) -

because there is no dispute Trump is a loud mouthed braggart. I find the claims that he is a racist to be of dubious validity

I resided in New Haven, years before you did. How high were those gates of Morse College? It is as if you are from a different planet.
Extract the log from your eye! I watched Bobby Seale led out of the courthouse at Elm and Church, in chains. Clarence Thomas noticed, too.
I could have a conversation with Justice Thomas. With you, not so much!

Clarence Thomas’s Counterrevolution

Clarence Thomas has fused elements of black nationalism and a bleak view of black history with a steadfast Constitutional originalism.

www.jacobinmag.com

...
"..Thomas believes that racism is so profoundly inscribed in the white soul that you’ll never be able to remove it. You see this belief in these quiet, throwaway lines in his opinions, which if you’re reading too fast you’ll miss. In 1992, in one of his early cases, Georgia v. McCollum, Thomas stated, “Conscious and unconscious prejudice persists in our society. Common sense and common experience confirms this understanding.” In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), he wrote, “If society cannot end racial discrimination, at least it can arm minorities with the education to defend themselves from some of discrimination’s effects.”


That “if” is a conditional only in the grammatical sense — that is, it governs the phrase that comes after — but not in the historical sense. Thomas’s point is that society cannot in fact end discrimination.


Racism is so profoundly inscribed in the white soul that you also have to dig deep in order to see its full extent. The deeper you dig, the closer you get to its beating heart. The overt bigotry of the South is merely the surface; its true depths are to be found in the North. Not among the angry white faces throwing rocks in South Boston, but in the genteel white smiles of liberal institutions like Yale Law School, which Thomas attended..."

yeah that gate was high-my sophomore year the Master asked me if I would live in the "gate room" because he figured I was the best student to be there if someone tried to sneak over the fence due to my background. What this has to do with Trump is beyond any rational comprehension though. BTW most of the crime in New haven was committed by who?

Well, we can have an exchange after all! Answer; the Yale Corporation.

Undergraduate / graduate student body of approx. 11,000. Endowment is now $31 billion or $2.2 million per Yale student.

Yale does not even fund the cost to New Haven taxpayers of fire protection of Yale students and employees and the property it has
amassed cheaply because of "crime" negcatively influencing commercial property values. So now, Yale owns half of "downtown".

The owners of the 40 percent of property that is taxable are expected to pay the costs of maintaining public services. Once Yale is finished purchasing property in New Haven and owns 75 percent of downtown, it will finally be in Yale's interest to commit to lowering thr crime rate that made Yale's property purchases attractive.

https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2021/01/25/colleges-taxes-endowments-cities-covid-19-budgets.html

"...And similar to Boston, payment imbalances relative to land values exist elsewhere. Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, for example, gave a voluntary payment of $13 million in 2020, although it holds around $3.5 billion in tax-exempt property within the city's borders.."

Mayor Elicker says 'Yale University needs to pay its part'

Yale University says it spends over $700 million annually directly on New Haven, including through compensation to New Haven residents it employs.

www.fox61.com

"...(Mayor)
Elicker says the university has contributed to the financial problems, though.

"60% of the property in New Haven is non-taxable," Elicker noted. "Overwhelmingly, that property is the university's property."

The Mayor says this is a question of ethics and responsibility and he believes it’s in the best interest of Yale to pony up.

"Yale wants to be in a city that’s thriving," Elicker said. "Yale does not want to see the kind of crime that we have and Yale needs to play a role a significant role in addressing that."

Elicker acknowledged that he and Yale President Peter Salovey are having conversations about the city's request..."

This is not a new problem. New Haven lost its former sizeable manufacturing base after urban renewal and construction of two
interstate highways and the Oak Street connector triggered "white flight". Civil unrest from 1966 to 1971 turned New Haven into
what is has become... Yale behind the boundaries of its well insulated and well protected campus, the Yale Corporation buying up and removing from the tax roles all properties it finds are "good buys"!

I had a friend who was a New Haven police rookie in 1977. A few months out of training he remarked, "if we could catch the "unidentified black male" described so frequently over the radio by police dispatchers, we would solve the crime problem. New haven is similar to so many other mid-sized, northeast cities. Social services, hospitals, and mass transit, and multi-family housing are not available in suburban towns because zoning boards prohibit such things. Realtors as a group are among the most extreme right racist I've observed.

well that is very interesting and appears to be fairly accurate. What it has to do with Trump, is perplexing but you may well remember the mayoral primary between Biagio DeLito (pardon my spelling is wrong) and Yale Graduate Frank Logue for the Democratic Party: in New Haven, that Primary was the real election. Logue wanted to tax Yale and make its facilities more open for public use, while DeLito-chief of police-promised Yale more public safety and less crime. My mother's late first cousin and her still living Husband (a retired professor at the Medical school) noted what you have said

Former New Haven police chief and mayor Dilieto's obituary -

Biagio DiLieto, 76, Mayor Of New Haven for a Decade (Published 1999)

Biagio DiLieto, former New Haven, Conn, mayor and police chief, dies at age 76; photo (M)

www.nytimes.com

A letter by former New Haven mayor, Frank Logue who immediately preceded Dilieto, appearing in the Feb., 2000 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine. :
Logue's wikipedia article describes him as a leftist.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Logue

 

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So far, so good, right? Two posters who don't often agree, appear to be in agreement about something. Cannot let something that rare go to waste. In a nutshell, I see the problem this way. Yale isn't moving, New Haven declined, Yale took advantage of its property tax exemption, the
rest of the city's tax base is too small to adequately fund services without driving taxes up so high that property values become even more depressed and Yale buys up what it has its eye on but doesn't already own, increasing even further the percentage of city properties exempt from property taxes.

All school districts in the state of CT are funded primarily from local property taxes. There is some state and federal aid for districts like the
New Haven School system, but no successful tax reform addressing the disparity of the wealth funding the Greenwich or New Canaan, CT school systems through property tax on ubiquitous mansions in those communities, vs in cities such as New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford.

The disparity was relieved when the Pequots of eastern CT opened the first casino in the Northeast in the late 1980s and an agreement was
reached for them to pay $100 million annually of casino profits to the state for funding to all school districts, but that revenue dried up due to the casino's bankruptcy filing a few years ago, influenced by the opening of numerous nearby competing casinos, including the first competitor, the nearby Mohawk Tribe's casino.

One condition I observe to be a "wrecking ball" is the profit motive of local realtors to exert their influence to maintain all properties at present market prices or higher. They do this by attempting to control who lives where. However, the main problem is school systems no consolidating to the county level, as in the county of one million I presently reside in, of just one school district with taxing authority in the entire county and relatively equal education funding per pupil, over the entire county.

An anecdote is the decline of salary of New Haven teachers in 1920, compared to today. There was parity of salaries of high school teachers and New Haven police officers in 1920, vs. recent salary of $50,000 of teachers with several years experience vs $63,000 for recent New Haven police hires. Female teachers in 1920 were paid less than males.

So, it seems like local control in sparsely populated counties throughout the U.S., TX indicating even more uneconomical separate counties than even GA has, and local control in suburban CT small cities and towns should be ended, with consolidation aimed at providing equal local service levels, especially in education, also eliminating the profit motive of realtors to steer minority home buyers out of towns or neighborhoods where they are perceived to lower property values.

I do not blame Yale and I hope TurtleDude will weigh in!